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The Final Push

I haven’t really said much of this out loud to very many people, but I’ve been battling depression rather poorly for the last year and a half. While I was severely depressed, the things I’ve always enjoyed and was passionate about didn’t seem to matter as much.

I’ve been feeling pretty positive about the direction I’ve been heading lately, and the last couple weeks have been the first time I’ve been genuinely happy. I mean, actually happy, over consecutive days. It’s a major milestone for me… I’m greatly enjoying baseball, my music, toys, and coding again. It hasn’t been the case at all since the fall of 2012.

I got pretty good at faking joviality, or at least I thought I was getting away with pretending to be happy around people. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate their company, or that I didn’t really enjoy being around them, it was just that once our time was over, I sank right back into being miserable. It’s pretty easy to distract yourself from your own mind when there’s a person dragging you out to dinner.

It’s annoying because I’ve always prided myself on being pragmatic and logical, so in my head I’ve always had the plan of how to move on. Having the thoughts and actually pushing through and confronting this shit were two different things. I made a big shift in my plan of attack about a month ago, and the dividends are finally showing.

I’m getting my confidence and sarcasm back, and my motivation is pretty much there. I’ve just had enough with losing complete track of time. Days, weeks, months just seemed to disappear without any recollection of what happened during the spans. I don’t want to live that way, and to push through once and for all, I had a span of three weeks where I was just mentally exhausted daily.

I had to constantly battle my own mind to stay positive and focused. As tired as I was every night during that concentrated struggle, you’d think I was participating in some extremely difficult manual labor. It’s been a very long road, and I’m relieved that I’m seeing the signs of it being remedied.

Part of me doesn’t want to publish this because I think it’s too personal. That part of me also reminds me that I don’t like this type of attention drawn on myself. I’ve always been one to keep my deepest feelings to myself, regardless of how unhealthy it is to do so. It’s a strategy that has never worked in my life, often resulting in eruptions of raw emotion when things fester beyond a breaking point.

I finally decided to go for it so the people that happen to read it will understand my erratic behavior over the last 18 months. I also think that if I reached out to more people and asked for support, I would have snapped out of it quicker. I don’t know. I’m optimistic that it’s the correct course of action.